I was watching the excellent Discover Ireland/All these highs and lows ad and thought if only. So here's a little quickly mashed together version with images taken mostly in the last couple of weeks which is probably more true to the actual summer.
FOR years and years the Young Wan had a Belfast accent despite living her whole life in Dublin. She had it even through the first years at school and slowly but surely little Dub things would creep in.
At one stage she even adopted one of the worst parts of Dublin accents and I say this without prejudice cos there are other Belfast collaqualisms and broad-accent on particular words she also adopted from time to time that also drove me nuts.
When she was really young she already understood the difference between how people speak in Belfast and Dublin and you could ask her to say things in Belfast and Dublin and she would, it was a great party piece.
I suppose I have little by little adapted my own lesser-Belfast accent. It has never been intentional, why would I want to lose my accent but maybe it isn't as strong as it was. And then I don't know, maybe I have adopted more Dublin sayings such as grand and the like than the accent. But there are some words that I had to change the way I say them or people just won't understand.
Dame as in Dame Street is one, Dorset as in Dorset Street is another. While our Dame to Dublin's Dame isn't that different, Dorset has an infliction on it that we [Belfast] don't use at all. When my Belfast mates first heard me pronounce it the way I have to they laughed their heads off and slagged me off saying I was a dirty Dub. (I know I have written about this before but I can't find it at all.) As Dorset Street is where Belfast drivers come into the city you say it a lot.
Then there are times when I hear my accent really strong, like on videos and I think Jaysus that is crazy. And then there are times when Red Mum is red-misty angry and apparently the accent comes out really strongly then.
Now the Young Wan's accent, I suppose, is kinda strange; a real mix. I don't really notice it anymore, except when she puts on something, then it jumps out at you. This can happen anytime but normally when she is on the phone to her pals.
So over the summer she is with her Nanny (Belfast accent) and when talking to the Young Wan on the phone everything was aye. She's gone all Belfast!
You may have seen this already buzzing around the blogosphere and here it is, some prisoners from a Filipino jail perform Michael Jackson's Thriller. My favourite character here has to be the damsel in distress as well as the numerous zombies...
I AM tearing myself away from Harry Potter to write about last night's midnight release of the Deathly Hallows and of course show some photographs.
I met up with Kaz and Decs at Waterstones cafe having passed Eason's on O'Connell Street on my way in where we went the last time and the crowd there was already mammoth.
Kaz and Decs were both inside Waterstones already only I wasn't allowed in because the Gardai had already been around complaining about the numbers inside.
Kaz did something I have never seen her do before, in fact I have never seen anyone do before, she pulled out her press pass and said 'this is my photographer' - course I had already been outside taking pics so it worked alright. I was actually bent over the front window taking pics as she came out. As we walked in she said: 'thank god you had your camera out I was banking on that'.
I don't feel in the slightest bit guilty about that and Decs pulled an even better one, he said he was from the Dublin Blog and also gained entry. LOL, I find it very funny that actually worked.
Fair play to the two of them.
The other reasons why I don't feel guilty about gaining entry above others is because they had a chair reserved at a table for me already, we were not in a queue for a book and we are going to publish pics and blogposts about it. So judging by the recent surge in Harry Potter visitors according to my stats, they can only gain if they went to any effort for the night that was in it.
Unlike Easons on O'Connell Street, the Dawson Street bookshops, Easons, Waterstones and Hodges and Figges were not having, at that stage anyway, any significant q problems.
Anyway once inside the Waterstones cafe we enjoyed lovely themed coffee and cupcakes as well as the balcony level photographic vantage point and at 11.10pm Kaz headed out to meet her boyfriend while Decs and I took some more snaps.
Battling my way through kids wanting their pics taken, who then posed and demanded to know which paper I was from, I took to saying Dublin Blog, so I may get some pics posted up there promptly so they can see themselves, I eventually left.
Once I left Waterstones I realised the others were just about to get into Hodges and Figges so I ran over and joined them just as they were getting inside.
We were being directed into the snaking long q that was winding around from the front desk into the back. Then Decs spotted some kids behind us booting away to the back of the shop and he asked the shop assistant was that for the back paydesk and she went 'ehm well yeah' so off we went were we joined a q which was very, very short.
Excellent, and one plus point for the effort Hodges and Figges otherwise didn't make for the opening, they certainly were not concerned with entertaining the people who were waiting for the event and certainly not in comparison with Easons or Waterstones.
But the craic in the q was great and I believe I exposed my penchant for freebies. I was saying that if after no real effort was made by them, apart from opening for midnight, if they didn't even go to the lengths of giving freebies I would go nuts.
But they did, a witches and wizards book, I don't know how much that will appeal to the Young Wan but hey. At 12.30am we were out of the shop and absolutely shocked to see the crazy massive queues outside both Waterstones and H&G. Walking down to the bottom of Dawson Street Easons we saw there was no q at all.
At that stage I got my taxi home with my little bag of Harry Potter. So here's some pics.
DO I bore you all by saying, as you have heard a million times already, what is up with the weather? Seriously, whats the story?
Water is precious, let's conserve it. Wear a bucket on your head...
The next one was taken in between showers.
And here's yet another joke email pic thats doing the rounds.
Just a couple of hours to go before the last Harry Potter book is released, can't wait. I watched the movie last week with Elly and some of the Blacknight guys and it was great. Can't wait to get my hands on the book.
I GOT this joke on email this morning, its rather similar to one I took myself yesterday during the thunder and lightening storm, you can see mine below. At least today there is some intermittent sun!
BELIEVE it or not but there were pockets of sunshine over the weekend. However by the time I arrived in Belfast on Saturday afternoon and we sat in the garden with a bottle of beer, the first drops of rain fell. The rest of the afternoon produced mad showers and warm sunny spells. Sunday on the other hand was beautiful, a real scorcher in Belfast anyway.
So just to prove that yes indeed the sun did show its face at some stages over the weekend, here's some fun in the sun shots.
It is an absolutely gorgeous day, it was getting to the stage where it felt unlikely we would ever see it again. So I'm on a train heading to Belfast where I am going to see a pal and help her get sorted photographically wise on her computer.
She is a recent convert to digital and after years of wanting to take a photography course finally started one last year.
As time went on it was clear that she was not enjoying it as much as she thought she would. Some of the classmates were very competitive. She was not learning what she wanted to learn and was feeling under increasing pressure with projects as it was an exam class. Couple all this with caring for two young children she eventually knocked the class on the head.
I figured the best thing for her to do would be to maybe join a camera club and at the very least join Flickr. There are groups for everything there full of tutorials on how to do everything. You can also store and sort images in an easy to manage fashion. You would not believe the amount of images I have and one of the easiest ways for me to manage is through Flickr and an external hard drive. Someday soon I will find a better system but for now it works well enough.
So one of the plans for today is to get out and about and take some snaps, hopefully we will keep the wonderful big clouds. I am going to try some HDR shots but my attempts at that so far has been eh strange. I need some slow moving clouds!
Anyway here's a song for the day, weekend even! Ah go wan.
THE auld things you never knew about me meme is doing the rounds again, Neil, Annette, Jenny and Rick have all tagged me. Having done it already here (okay it was five things but still) I am finding it hard to think of more things that are interesting enough to write about. Seriously I think you already know everything about me. I tried asking Tetra ‘give me something about me that people might not know’. Her suggestions were useless. So it is back to me wracking my brains.
Rules
1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
With the rules out of the way, here goes:
1. My middle name is Noele and yup it is spelt wrong. But as this is how it appears on my birth certificate this is it. I was born at Christmas so it could have been worse, something like Santa or Carol/e. (And just to be clear I do not use this as a password hint or security question anywhere so don’t worry.)
2. Actually that’s another thing, having a Christmas birthday is a b*ll*x. As you get older and friends move around, less and less people celebrate your birthday with you. You also get the Christmas card with Happy Birthday written on it. I hate this, I would prefer not to receive a card at all than that nonsense.
3. I loathe liquorice, it is vile horrible stuff. So it also makes sense that I am not too keen on fennel or anything else that has that strain of flavour.
4. I am a Godparent three times over, two I see all the time, the other I don’t at all and not by choice.
5. I have pretty much the same gang of friends (along with some wonderful people I met along the way) I had as a child. It is great and I love them all.
6. I have had many nicknames over the years including Red, Ginger, Ginger+ my real name (I thought the point of nicknames is that they are shorter), Ging, Ginge, you name I have been called it. An ex of mine used to get really annoyed by people calling me Ging, I have to say while I prefer Red, Ging never really bothered me because they are not being nasty unlike those I mention in point 7.
7. I had the fiercest time growing up with red hair in Belfast, tormented I was particularly from my teenage years onwards. I was called many nasty things concerning my hair colour; that did bother me. I will write about that sometime.
8. I have photographs of me with George Best (my eyes are shut) AND oohh ahhh Paul McGrath. I don’t follow football at all and probably wouldn’t follow Man U even if I did. But hey they are both legends. Oh and Paul McGrath is well deserving of the ohhh ahhh title. I met him a couple of times after and was blown away when he would say hello remembering my name.
I won’t tag anyone to do this as I always feel guilty when I’ve been tagged and take an age to complete it. Every time I post and it isn’t the tagged meme I feel like I am hurting someone’s feelings. I know that’s just plain silly and not the case but still I feel that way. Feel free to work away if you fancy and leave a comment pointing me to your responses.
I have a dilemma, there are two big releases this summer and for the first time I am not in a position to revel in it. Well I can revel in it I will just look like a crazy woman, not to mention Paddy-no-mates or should that be crazy Paddy-no-kids woman.
Confused? You shouldn’t be, this summer sees the release of not one but two Harry Potter launches, the next movie ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’ AND the next book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And yeah I am without child over the summer so I am wondering how I am going to pull these off.
The Young Wan got madly into Harry Potter after the second book and while I loved it too at the time I was more than a little annoyed that she refused point-blank to read anything else for a seriously long time. While the book has been fantastic encouraging kids who don’t normally read to do so, the Young Wan was never like that.
She always had her nose in a book, always. I am told I was the same. Once Harry Potter hit, they were the only books she stuck her nose into.
How and ever it is very easy to see how a kid can get lost in the world of witches, wizards and muggles. They inspire the imagination, not least mine.
Over the years the Young Wan has gotten the latest books and read them in record time and then reread and reread them. Once she falls asleep I get my chance to pull the book from her clutches and get my reading share done before morning.
Then the movies were made and we had a whole new Harry Potter aspect to get excited about. I got massive brownie points by managing to get preview tickets for each of the movies and she was able to see it days before her friends.
Okay it was only days but to her that was cool kudos.
Now this year we have a movie AND a book, oh my. Oh yeah and the Young Wan is on holiday with her Nanny for the summer.
How will I get to see the movie? Do I go on my own clutching my wee bag of sweets and ignore the families around me who will probably ignore the sad woman sitting on her own. I could see me in that scenario wedged in between, urrgggh, courting couples (probably) and hoards of, arrgghhh, excited kids (likely). Kids’ excitement doesn’t bother me as long it is my kid’s excitement.
Maybe I should rent a child for the movie? The Young Wan will surely want to know all about it; in case there is no English-speaking version of the film where she is on holiday.
Then there is the book launch. I wrote here about the last book launch we went to two years ago and it was a great buzz. I’d like to do that again even just for taking better pictures than I managed to the last time. But I really don’t fancy queuing on my own at midnight outside Easons. Besides which the Young Wan kept our place in the queue the last time while I took some snaps.
So if I want to do the same this time I will have to try and rope someone else in to accompany me, trouble is I can think of no one at all who would oblige. So it kinda looks like I will be the mad person on my own while all the fun and festivities are taking place around me. At least I can hide behind my camera.
I’ll be joining the Young Wan in a couple of weeks after the book is out and if I do not have it with me, there will be hell to pay. So I may put my embarrassment to one side and go watch the movie on my own and go get the book and the pics as well of course.
Bring Back Blogorrah, via Damien, via The Swiss Job.
Come on lads, we're dying here, pretty please...
RIGHT you asked for it, you know who you are. I'm talking about selfish commuters who must feel somehow that because they have bought a ticket that they own the bus. This post is for you because you obviously do not know how to travel on the bus, where others are travelling too. Hopefully after this post all our journeys can be more pleasant.
As you can probably tell I had one of 'those' bus journeys home this evening, couple the selfish traveller with rain, umbrellas and lots of other people trying to get home and oh it just wasn't nice.
My rant is against the obviously clueless (well I guess they must be clueless, maybe it is just pure and utter selfishness) commuter and in particular the one who irked me this evening, sitting at the end of a seat who think that doing so makes the whole seat theirs; no matter how much you pretend not to notice the bus is packed to the gills. Rather like those drivers who drive into yellow boxes and sit poker-straight staring out the front of the car and not at the hoards of cars honking their horns who are legally turning into the yellow box the poker-straight driver has kept them out of.
I have also noticed that the people who sit at the end of a seat, whether it is on a bus or indeed a train normally read as if pretending to be engrossed in a book somehow distracts the perpretrator from the surrounding dirty looks. I think I would feel that amount of annoyance directed at me.
This evening despite the crowded bus, despite the rain, this woman sat perched on the end of the seat at the back making it doubly hard for anyone to take the seat beside her. Adapting this trick by placing a bag on the seat next to you also doesn't wash. And I am not talking about someone who has got on a semi-empty bus who falls over themselves to pick up their bag and move over when they see people moving up towards the seat.
So the first pic illustrates what not to do:
And this demonstrates what to do.
I HAVE been memed a couple of times recently and am only getting around to it now. First up is the charity meme as tagged by Bill (the second will follow in another post.). The idea behind it is to push up the page ranking of Irish charity websites. So here are my contributions (the first five) as well as those added by other bloggers. Feel free to do one of your own.
I WENT to see Joan As Police Woman the other night in Vicar Street, excellent show altogether. It is a strange venue with all the seats practically piled up on top of each other. But it is intimate which is great. I imagine it is intimidating for a performer but Joan as Policewoman had the crowd eating of their hands.
I got some videos and some pics. So here you go.
AFTER the last post and before my shower, I am trying to clear my mind with lovely fluffy things, like little fluffy dogs.
What was I thinking about? Oh yeah lovely fluffy dogs.
A BIG skip has been sitting in front of the house across the street today and it has been fairly packed since I saw it this morning.
Getting home from work and sitting at the laptop I've been amused to watch people scavange over the contents. Three young wan's had a good old hoke earlier and came away with a stash of stuff. One even climbed up on top, it is a BIG skip, and
Just then I heard an almighty crash and saw two older men hunting about, throwing stuff to the street, smashing stuff.
So I started to record it. It wouldn't be great quality at all, in fact you would probably be lucky to see it nevermind shooting through a big tree, but hey they were throwing stuff about. One of the men disappeared and then all of a sudden I realised that he was actually in the viewfinder having a not-so-very discreet bathroom moment. And not the stand-up kind either! Jaysus I think we are almost impervious to that, you see it so often. The other is just soooo wrong.
And is it not a bit more than strange that his mate waited for him to do this?
After the *ahem* deed was done, they then proceeded to hail a taxi. I mean come on, nearly home and all that.
Seriously, that's fifty shades of wrong. And I, urrgg, caught, urrghh, it, urrgg, on video. Delete, delete, delete.
Uurrgggghhh. I'm off to have a shower.
I'VE just realised that I hit the 500 post mark a couple of posts ago. So here's post number 506 with some images from the weekend.
Yup its official me and my mates are buck eejits. Here's 'Do Charlie for me' - all will be revealed.
Eh, strike what I just said...
"its raining now and there are lovely green smells coming in the window, my window boxes are also getting a great watering and every now and again people walk past on their way home. Sometimes they stop under the tree in the picture below for shelter before continuing on home. But as rain goes the sprinkling this evening is nothing compared to the drenching we have been at the receiving end of recently."
It is absolutely lashing down now. Lashing, in sheets.
IN MY last post I posted a photograph out my window that was taken earlier this afternoon and its a view I have loved over the years I have been here. I love my big bay window.
When I first moved in here, there were two things that sold me on this flat. One was the open fire; the other was the beautiful bay window. The fact that I didn't have much choice is incidental to the fact that my flat had a feature that was wonderfully drawing. Once I moved in I set about moving the kitchen units which were placed in front of the window obscuring it. Since then I've spent a serious amount of time sitting in front of the window looking out hence the lots of pics I have of life going on outside my window.
While today was really lovely, so is this evening. Its raining now and there are lovely green smells coming in the window, my window boxes are also getting a great watering and every now and again people walk past on their way home. Sometimes they stop under the tree in the picture below for shelter before continuing on home. But as rain goes the sprinkling this evening is nothing compared to the drenching we have been at the receiving end of recently.
Out my window - this evening.
Don't know what I have done to this pic to make it look so veiled.
This is a one taken on St Patrick's Day; a guy walking up the road gives a big 'howdie' to a passing Guinness truck. Course the Guinness truck just ignored him.
